vBulletin tables in CSS?

[Velocd]

Those of you who visit Sitepoint know there are many articles, as well a book (or two) on explaining why using CSS to accommodate for what tables do is far more efficient than going the old style.

This is quoted from a recent article by Dan Shafer, about the stuff:

Tables Mean Long Load Times

Most people don't know that Web browsers are deliberately designed to ensure that each table downloads as a single entity. So, none of the material that's contained in a table will be displayed until all the contents of that table are downloaded to the client machine, and available for display.

When the original, intended purpose of tables is taken into account, this makes sense. Tables were designed to display? well? tables of data. Each cell contained a value that was being compared to, or related with, the values of other cells in the table. Isolated bits of data appearing quasi-randomly would not do; the table was a single, integrated entity.

When designers began to rely on tables to contain all or most of the content of a Web page, they were also saddled with the consequences of this design decision. In addition to the apparent delay that many users experience as a result of tables displaying all at once, the sheer volume of HTML code that is required to create today's Web page layouts with nested tables can also add actual load time due to increased page size. Table-based layouts almost certainly account for more user concern over long page load times than any other single factor.

Avoiding this significant load time would obviously be A Good Thing.

I haven't finished reading the entire article up yet (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1167/1), and I'm not sure what to think whether performance is impeded that much.. but CSS is looking to grow to be the dominant standard to replace HTML tables.

Does vBulletin have any plans in replacing their tables with CSS?

[filburt1]

CSS has virtually nothing that can universally replace tables, although vB3 is heavily reliant on CSS for most everything else it can do.

[Dean C]

Yep i've joined the CSS revolution but after trying to code a layout in entirely css replacing tables with <div> tags i only managed to get it to display right in IE (which tells you a lot )

I just use the power of css to ditch attributes to the tags im using and occasionally to control the position of the whole layout on the page

- miSt

[bobk]

i only managed to get it to display right in IE

Heh, that's my experience with about 90% of CSS stuff. For that matter, CSS support seems to vary among the various browsers just as badly as traditional HTML.

The thing about tables and long load times isn't such an issue in the days of broadband. There are a couple of things you can do to speed 'em up, though, and to spare your dial-up users the worst of the delays. Best tip is to be sure to set height and width attributes for any image that's displayed in a table. That way, the browser will render the table as soon as it knows the dimensions (ie after the HTML has loaded but before it gets the image file).

I dunno... as a webmaster, I'd rather answer questions about slow load times than mucked-up CSS rendering in obscure browsers.